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You've got us on our knees, Layla, but who are you?
Lola, you walk like a woman, but are you really a man?
Suzanne, what's with the tea and oranges?
We hum their namesake tunes but know little of their lives. Real women have long been immortalized in song, and sometimes the stories behind the lyrics are as compelling as the melodies themselves.
For an anecdotal history lesson about some of pop music's leading ladies, we contacted our favorite Minnesota Public Radio DJ, Steve Seel.
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SONG: "Jolene," Dolly Parton
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene/I'm begging of you please don't take my man/Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene/please don't take him just because you can."
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: Rumor has it this song about adultery was written from personal experience — that Parton suspected her husband of fantasizing about a redheaded bank teller because of his suddenly frequent trips to the bank.
In fact, Parton says the inspiration came from a little redheaded girl named Jolene who once asked her for an autograph.
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SONG: "Layla," Eric Clapton
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Layla, you've got me on my knees/Layla, I'm begging, darling please/Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind."
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: This tune was a disguised love letter to George Harrison's wife, Patti Boyd. Clapton was good friends with Harrison, but while that friendship grew, so did Clapton's love affair with Boyd. Eventually, the dalliance led to her divorce from Harrison. (Amazingly, the two men remained friends.)
The name Layla comes from a Persian folk tale about a woman who runs off with a man she loves after her father marries her off to a different man. The man who loses Layla is driven to madness.
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SONG: "Lola," by The Kinks
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls/It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world/except for Lola, Lo lo lo lo Lola."
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: This is "rock's most beloved tale of either transvestitism or transsexualism or possibly both or possibly neither."
The Kinks' Ray Davies has said he wrote the song after the band's manager spent an entire evening in a club dancing with a transvestite. There is apparently an account of this evening where the band are discussing the incident and one of them asks another, "Did you see the stubble on her?" To which the response was, "Yeah, but Bob doesn't seem to care about it."
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SONG: "Veronica," by Elvis Costello
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "She used to have a carefree mind of her own/and a devilish look in her eye/saying `You can call me anything you like/but my name is Veronica.'"
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: There's not too much to this one. The name was chosen randomly, and the subject matter — an elderly woman, possibly suffering from Alzheimer's, who has been forgotten by society — was inspired, at least in an indirect way, by Costello's grandmother.
That is hinted at in Costello's famous "Veronica" music video, which can be seen here. )
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SONG: "Suzanne," by Leonard Cohen
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river/You can hear the boats go by/You can spend the night beside her/And you know that she's half crazy/But that's why you want to be there."
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: This is based on a real person, Suzanne Verdal, a dancer in Montreal who was friends with Cohen. She really did take him to her place by the river and feed him tea and oranges, as the song describes.
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SONG: "Maybellene," Chuck Berry
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Maybellene, why can't you be true?/Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?/You've started back doing the things you used to do."
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: This is probably not a real person, but more a composite image at best. The song is a mood song — one of '50s youth — and is a remake of the classic hillbilly tune "Ida Red."
Berry has claimed he got the name from a cow in a child's nursery rhyme, although it could be a misspelling of the famous line of cosmetics, since Berry was a hairdresser before his music career took off.
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SONG: "Polly," by Nirvana
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Polly wants a cracker/I think I should get off her first/I think she wants some water/to put out the blowtorch."
ACCORDING TO DJ STEVE: Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad wrote that Kurt Cobain based Polly on the true story of a 14-year-old rape victim from Tacoma, Wash. She was abducted after going to a punk-rock show, and her captor raped and tortured her with a blowtorch.
Rock critic Greil Marcus has also drawn a connection between this song and the old murder ballad "Pretty Polly," about a girl lured to her death by a knife-wielding murderer named Willie.
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SONG: "Evangeline," Matthew Sweet
LYRICS FOR THE LADY: "Try her on/She fits like a glove/Too bad she only thinks about/the lord above/Evangeline, Evangeline/I think I love you/But Evangeline Evangeline/I want you."
DJ STEVE SAYS: This is an ode to a comic book character — a swashbuckling superhero nun.
"Sweet's ode to his beloved is so convincing and so desperate that to me it's just a stand-in for any beautiful female that a guy just can't have. In one case it might be because she's a famous movie star. In another, it's because she's a pen-and-ink drawing."
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Hillary Rhodes is an asap staff reporter.
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